Poetry Heading Down 95 South

The hectic has arrived...Friday 7-10 a packed reading from literary magazines Barrelhouse and Smartish Pace with stars including Terence Winch, I know he's good, and Sandra Beasley, whom I am given to understand from reliable sources is absolutely the sh--. In the Poetry Lounge, 9th floor.

Saturday night it's Busboys and Poets with a poetry jam, full backing music, very cool, dance and theater stage, 6th floor, 10 til past midnight.

Warmup: Fire dance with Playa del Fuego Fire Conclave, outside at 9:30.

Even earlier Saturday: Storm the Unpredictable on the Solo Stage, 3rd floor, 4-5.

Kind of Like Madonna! Only Way, Way Different!

Richard Peabody is reading a week from now, and I'm not even going to try to condense the bio for this space. All I can think about at this hour is falling over laughing like 20 years ago hearing him read a poem with a line about "the cereal shot from guns." You'll just have to look here to get the full story. But those Morton Salt Girl-era poems are still fresh. Must be the preservatives.

He's published Paul Bowles and Nick Cave and A.M. Holmes and more than a thousand more. He can make a poem or a story out of standing in the kitchen, or listening to German metal at a stupid bar, or, of course, taking care of his kids. He's killed off his magazine and brought it back from the dead. Mondo Barbie, Mondo Jimi, Mondo Elvis, Mondo Abortion? (I wonder if he gets how brave he is, or how many artists he's made a difference to? We're not supposed to talk about things like that, but I can, because I never have to worry about being cool.) Do you know how hard it is to put out even one damn book? A really long time ago, he was a wrestler.

The other night my husband and I were doing late-night puttering, computers and phones and TVs going, and he had on Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, and I was taken by this scene, just looking right past the whole Nic Cage factor, watching John Goodman do what he does, and there's this monologue for Cage and in the background this pattern of lights behind him, and I'm thinking gorgeous mid-60s technicolor, right, but the thing is with Scorsese, he's probably referencing 12 other pictures I don't even know about and have never seen, and here it's all packed into one simple almost throwaway scene in a picture not even considered by many to be his best. That's an artist on top of his game, and it's what you gain insight into when you see one who's been working that game for a while. Sprezzatura, and I'm sure there's also a word for it in Japanese. Come on out next Wednesday and see.

Photo: Another one I haven't read and want to. Angela Carter's in this one, y'all, it's just getting ridiculous!

B&D Rock Opera

Just found out a chunk of "The Passion of Persephone" will be performed tomorrow night, I mean tonight, (Wednesday) at 6. It's a journey to the underworld; what could go wrong? Leather, Hades, darkness, testing limits, say no more. I've been curious about this one ever since briefly meeting the composer, Rosanna Tufts, at a woowoo-type event more than a year ago. Great voice. She did a work-in-progress version at the Fringe festival last summer, too, that I also missed. Sometimes I actually do get out of the house.

Sharing the slot in the Theater and Dance space will be "According to Us," a musical play about people who are homeless.

The Peanut Butter Cup Concept

Thibeaux Lincecum's series of photographs with their subjects' poems printed on them is pretty transgressive--every photographer I've known has flinched at the mention of running type over the photo, and I've known very few poets who want their pictures taken.

Despite or because of that, it's fascinating; the poems function as self-portraits and the photos like portraits through another's eyes, so there are interesting angles and juxtapositions, who owns the gaze, who interprets, words vs. visuals cage match, you got chocolate in my peanut butter, all that. One nice piece is by isee, who will be reading at the comehearpoets reading June 19.

Lincecum is looking for more subjects to be part of the project--the goal is a book--so if he already has a photo of you, you can write a poem; if you're a poet, check his website for details, and if you want to get involved, he'll take a portrait or similar. He's comfortable to sit for, and for me, who hates getting shot, that's saying something. The work is on display on the second floor, near the elevators.

I'm always suspicious of NPR-induced revelations and discoveries, but there must have been a reason for me to be in the car Sunday, right where 13th turns into Piney Branch, and there they were talking about the poet Constantine Cavafy and a new translation by Daniel Mendelsohn, which I read a review of and thought maybe I should check that out, and then Mendelsohn read his translation of "Nero's Deadline." And I was all "fuck yeah! That's why you're doing this!" Poem made me laugh my head off.

My point being that hearing it made me get it. That's why live readings work. You can hear it here.

Or you can read the following translation, which is available free online. Those Mendelsohn translations I heard really got me because they are so unabashed and balanced about the eroticism of the poems. YMMV, read, hear, see what you think.

Nero's Deadline
Nero wasn’t worried at all when he heard
the utterance of the Delphic Oracle:
“Beware the age of seventy-three.”
Plenty of time to enjoy himself still.
He’s thirty. The deadline
the god has given him is quite enough
to cope with future dangers.

Now, a little tired, he’ll return to Rome—
but wonderfully tired from that journey
devoted entirely to pleasure:
theatres, garden-parties, stadiums...
evenings in the cities of Achaia...
and, above all, the sensual delight of naked bodies...

So much for Nero. And in Spain Galba
secretly musters and drills his army—
Galba, the old man in his seventy-third year.

--Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard, from the official cavafy website.

The really funny part that strikes me now is that I wrote a scene and song for a play where Thibeaux was supposed to play Nero, a stock-character Nero. But the scene got cut cause he had to work and it was too long anyhow. Not that he's Nero-like in any way. I remember as we were talking about it, he was actually trying to school me on some of the history, and I was all, don't confuse me with facts.

But facts make this poem funnier and sadder. One does feel a little foolish remaining devoted to pleasure when Wall Street falls down, but how much sillier must the ones who built it feel? And all we keep hearing is how nobody, but nobody, could have seen it coming.

More synchronicity: I had some of the best peanut-butter-cup cookies ever this just like an hour after hearing that poem. Maybe I'll get the recipe and bring some to one of these readings.

Surprise! Poetry in Motion

Because she might be the greatest hooper in the USA. Because she plays with fire. What else do you need to know? Surprise! Hoops and Fire Dance, 9 tonight.

If the weather isn't friendly to fire, she and her talented minions, um, comrades are doing it again Saturday night at 8.

(Then you can stay for Flush Gordon vs. The Criminal Union of Nefarious Treachery at 10:30, a musical that will blow your mind.)

Photo: From her website, modeling her t-shirts. Many talents.

And Now...Charles Jensen. And For You, Open Mic.

It's getting kind of spooky. I keep asking really interesting poets to read, and they keep saying yes. Charles Jensen just came on for Friday, June 19. Among many other publications, he had some very chilling poems in No Tell Motel, whose editor Reb Livingston will be reading June 26, which I discovered poking around online late one night, and because I am an out-of-touch-with-literary-world person I was amazed at discovering, and I tried to read through all the archives that night, without success. I feel like a discount Kevin Bacon.

Plus, film. Here's his bio from his website, where you can also get links to some poems:

"Charles Jensen is the author of three chapbooks, including Living Things, which won the 2006 Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, and The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon (New Michigan Press, 2007). His first full-length collection, tentatively titled The First Risk, is forthcoming in 2009 from Lethe Press. A past recipient of an Artist’s Project Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, his poetry has appeared in Bloom, Columbia Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, The Journal, New England Review, spork, and West Branch. He holds an MFA in poetry from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing an MA in Nonprofit Leadership and Management. He is the founding editor of the online poetry magazine LOCUSPOINT, which explores creative work on a city-by-city basis. He serves as director of The Writer's Center, one of the nation's largest independent literary centers."

Photo: Blatantly stolen from his website as well.

Slam Poetry Crash Course for Teens

Wanted to write for two days, but was dealing with coordinating my daughter's social life, as well as a rash she developed that caused a minor medical panic then vanished after 8 hours as mysteriously as it had appeared (I suspect it was from when she and her friends were hiding behind juniper bushes at a party Sunday. Juniper is only fit for adults, when part of a properly prepared stirred-not-shaken medicinal regimen.)

If you're coordinating your children's schedules, add this: For ages 10 to 18, on Saturday, June 6, poet Gayle Danley will be giving a Slam Poetry Crash Course in the Education Room at Artomatic (should I call it the Utrecht education room and give proper credit? Why not.) On her website, she talks about slam poetry being "accessible poetry" that "tells your truth--out loud." Not a bad thing for people of any age to learn how to do.

She is an international slam winner and active poet, as well as a Howard alum. You can read more about her work here.

The class is from 3 to 5 PM. It makes a lot of sense to sign up first, here.